Paris court rejects Canal+ bid for daily fines against Cloudflare
in plain words
Canal+, a French TV company, wanted Cloudflare punished for not blocking pirate sports streaming sites properly. A Paris court said Cloudflare did enough by blocking sites through its CDN service, a network that speeds up websites, even though it left its public DNS resolver A DNS resolver open for anyone on the internet to use. Full definition of public DNS resolver tool, 1.1.1.1, untouched. The court said Cloudflare isn't responsible when pirate sites move to other services. So Cloudflare avoids any fines for now.
French courts have increasingly ordered internet companies, including resolver The DNS server that looks up domain names on behalf of users. Full definition of resolver, VPNs, search engines and CDN providers, to block pirate sports streaming sites. In April, the Paris Judicial Court ordered Cloudflare to block 21 domains tied to pirate Formula 1 streams and 16 linked to MotoGP, without specifying the blocking method, only requiring action by any effective means.
Canal+, the broadcaster that sought the original blocking orders, argued Cloudflare fell short and asked the Paris court in May to impose penalties of €50,000 per day for each site still accessible and each new site reported by media regulator Arcom. Canal+ said Cloudflare blocked only three of the 21 Formula 1 domains and three of the 16 MotoGP domains through its CDN, and that some blocked sites resurfaced later via a different CDN or a mirror site.
On September 17, a three-judge panel The one or three independent experts who decide a domain dispute. Full definition of panel rejected both penalty requests. The court acknowledged that Cloudflare enforces blocking only through its CDN service, not its public DNS resolver, but found this acceptable since the original order let Cloudflare choose which service to use. Cloudflare told the court that CDN-based blocking is far more effective than DNS Domain Name System The internet's directory that links domain names to computer addresses. Full definition of DNS blocking, and that the architecture of its 1.1.1.1 resolver makes blocking impractical.
The court noted that Cloudflare blocked 72.6 percent of the ordered domains, treating this as evidence of genuine cooperation rather than noncompliance. It also ruled that Cloudflare cannot be held responsible when pirate sites switch to another CDN or redirect to mirror sites; instead, Canal+ must pursue the new host or report mirrors to Arcom.
Canal+ cited the EU Court of Justice's UPC Telekabel Wien decision, arguing intermediaries must block effectively. The Paris court disagreed, interpreting the ruling as requiring only reasonable measures, which it found Cloudflare had taken. The court denied the penalties as disproportionate and rejected Canal+'s separate claim for €20,000 in legal costs.
Cloudflare's transparency reports show it has never blocked content through 1.1.1.1, despite orders from French and Italian courts, while it geoblocked 1,238 domains in France in the second half of 2025 under one order, and 662 domains in the first half under seven orders. Cloudflare has also told the European Commission, in response to its Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List consultation, that public DNS resolvers should not be used for blocking or restricting content.